These are brilliant and insightful essays aimed at a professional, even academic, audience, rather than casual poetry lovers. The focus is primarily on major poets who came to prominence in the 1950s, with a definite preference for formalists. The pieces range from short, but substantial considerations of single aspects of a poet's work to longish surveys of entire careers. McClatchy's method, most often, is to discuss poems in some detail with substantial excerpts. I tended to find the essays on poets I am more familiar with, or sympathetic to, more helpful than those on poets less to my tastes. ( )